5 ms·

...that is, unless Disney can force another extension to Copyright law in the next couple days. I wouldn't be surprised if they did (or tried, at least)

jedberg 4y ago
They stopped doing that a while ago. They realized it didn't matter and was more beneficial for them so they can scoop up more public domain and make more movies out of it.
- phist_mcgee 4y ago
  Kids don't care about Mickey they care about Rocket Raccoon.
  - Pet_Ant 4y ago
    Yeah, I realised my children, barely a decade old, don't really know the cartoon characters I took for evergreen as a child: Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, Yogi Bear, Woody Woodpecker and Rocky & Bullwinkle. I mean they could probably name all of them, but don't really have an attachment or think they belong to a pantheon of any sorts. I assume that companies foresaw this coming and decided not to invest in further developing or promoting characters that they couldn't have exclusive merchandising rights for the foreseeable future. Just making money off a new movie isn't enough if you can't have sole rights to license the t-shirts and have the current children introduce it to their children.
    - jedberg 4y ago
      They aren't stuck with 6 TV channels to choose from and they don't have the privilege of Saturday morning cartoons to introduce all of them. They have curated experiences on streaming apps.
    - gus_massa 4y ago
      I tested with my 5 years old daughter: * She knows Mikey and Minie, I was sure about that, but I asked her anyway what kind of animal they are. [Hi from Argentina. In Spanish(es-ar) it's not obvious that "Mikey Mouse" is a "ratón".] She likes them. * Surprisingly, she knows Tom and Jerry, but she thinks it's a cat and two mice (??). I guess my brother show her a few cartoons (??), and in some of them Jerry has a friend (??). * All the other are dead. They have been good characters.
      - flobosg 4y ago
        > but she thinks it's a cat and two mice (??) > and in some of them Jerry has a friend (??) That’s probably Nibbles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_(Tom_and_Jerry) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_(Tom_and_Jerry)
    - joshspankit 4y ago
      And yet; if those characters were public domain they might be alive and well in the imagination of children today.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  It's incredible the amount of damage they've done in the meantime. If only they can rollback the changes they, and their lackeys, pushed through.
  - weregiraffe 4y ago
    >It's incredible the amount of damage they've done in the meantime How can you quantify this damage?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- MaxBarraclough 4y ago
  > They realized it didn't matter and was more beneficial for them so they can scoop up more public domain and make more movies out of it. I don't have anything concrete to back this up, but it seems more likely to me that they just don't see much potential revenue in content from the 1920's, so they see little to be gained from further spending on copyright-extension lobbying. Put another way, they've already succeeded. Copyright terms aren't actually unending, but in profit terms (or practical terms more broadly) the difference is minimal.
  - zerocrates 4y ago
    Doesn't really make sense, as these same 20s works were the ones that were kept out of the public domain the first time around with the Copyright Term Extension Act.
    - MaxBarraclough 4y ago
      Good point. Follow-on question then: why did they push for it last time? Was 1920's content more valuable at that time?
Gigachad 4y ago
Tbh it would have been better if we just allowed corporations to continue paying to extend their own copyrights forever and everything that's no longer commercially viable or doesn't have an entity owning it just gets freed quickly.
- cmeacham98 4y ago
  Can you explain how this is better? Also, how would we write a law to determine if something is "commercially viable"?
  - MarioMan 4y ago
    If the copyright makes more money than it costs to maintain, then it is financially viable. I often see this approach proposed alongside a renewal fee that rises each time it is renewed, so that works will eventually become too expensive to maintain copyright on and thus aren't held in perpetuity.
    - joshspankit 4y ago
      What stops people from buying 1000 copyrights, then using the profitable ones to pay the ongoing fees while also buying more?
  - LordDragonfang 4y ago
    The law isn't making that determination, the entities paying to indefinitely extend its copyright are (presumably at exponentially increasing rates). If it isn't viable, they don't pay and the copyright lapses.
  - richardwhiuk 4y ago
    As in as a company you have to pay to extend copyright on a certain work.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    The idea is specifically to solve the orphan works problem. Practically speaking, life+70 is not that far off from perpetual copyright anyway. Nobody cares if a book published today will be escheated to the public domain in 2093, and very few works from 1927 are valuable enough to retain copyright today. In fact, it's so valueless that the vast majority of works still under copyright do not have public documentation of title. The only way to find out who owns these works is to get sued for pirating them. So the idea is to create some kind of small formality that people have to jump through in order to retain ownership over a work, because vastly more works will hit the public domain even if it means Mickey Mouse will always and forever live in a cramped pet store cage shaped like a circle-C. How to define "commercially viable" is... complicated. You can either make copyright fully pay-to-play to soak Disney, or you can err on the side of cheap renewals. I've also heard talk of sliding-scales based on taxable value of the property under copyright. I don't think it really matters as long as we have a reasonable process to strip orphan works of their copyright protection.
yieldcrv 4y ago
They have said they wont because people notice and care now. Thats an interest way of interacting in society. I want that power.
jcranmer 4y ago
Steamboat Willie doesn't go public domain until 2024, so there's technically another year. Disney is unlikely to attempt to push through another copyright term extension (see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-its-not-planning-another-copyright-extension-push/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-i... for fuller details). The two main reasons are that there is a much more forceful caucus in politics against copyright extension than there was 25 years ago, and the arguments for doing so are weaker (the copyright extension 25 years ago was partially driven by raising copyright term in the US from "life + 50" to "life + 70", in line with European standards). If one pays careful attention however, one would note that Disney has, over the past few years, started using a clip from Steamboat Willie more aggressively in its films, which has led many to wonder if they're planning on taking down anyone who distributes Steamboat Willie on the basis of trademark violations instead.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  I've noticed them putting steam boat willie in all of the credits, at the same time things were going into the public domain, I had always assumed that was the game plan. Make steamboat willie trademark not copyright, and the laws become a lot more flexible around that.
- class4behavior 4y ago
  In this case "European standards" are the product of US corporations - among others - laying foundation for the support of reforms at home.
  - mannerheim 4y ago
    Life + 50 was in much of Europe in 1886 with the Berne Convention. Germany had a copyright duration of 80 years after the death of the author at one point; blaming US corporations for this is absurd when Europe has had plenty of domestic publishers with entrenched interests in longer copyright durations.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    European copyright laws have often been much stricter than in the US, in part because publishers have long been very close to the state (in countries like France and Germanu for example). If anything, Europe has been the bad influence historically, and has pionniered copyright treaties as the sibling comment mentions. It's crazy what some Europeans can blame the US for though.
Sunspark 4y ago
No extension in the next couple days, but there will be another 20+ year extension purchased within the next 11 years. Why? To make sure 1938 doesn't go PD. I will leave it up to the reader as an exercise to determine what is special about 1938.
- daemoens 4y ago
  What's special about 1938?
  - leviathant 4y ago
    I'm going to guess the reference here is Superman
    - Sunspark 4y ago
      That's right! DC Comics is owned by Warner Brothers. In 1939 you have Namor the Sub-Mariner which is owned by Disney.
      - joshspankit 4y ago
        I wonder what Siegel and Shuster would say
- andirk 4y ago
  When Itchy & Scratchy teamed up for the war effort [0]? Documents on Prescott Bush, grandfather of Bush Jr, who happily sold steel to the Nazis and created the current Bush family pile [1]? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vhL6QsPGac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vhL6QsPGac [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworl...
- ebiester 4y ago
  Is the start of the golden age of comic books enough? I'm honestly not convinced.
standardUser 4y ago
I'm doubting a Republican Congress will go out of its way to support Disney. The fake "culture wars" may yield some unintended benefits.
GloriousKoji 4y ago
Disney is over lobbying for copyright and instead went for the legal gymnastics gold of extending Trademark protections (which never expire) to things that should fall under copyright law.
mannerheim 4y ago
Disney gets blamed a lot for this, but I don't really buy it. The copyright extension in '76 brought America into the same copyright duration as stipulated by the Berne Convention of 1886 (although the US would not sign on until a decade later), and the Sonny Bono act extended copyright length to the same as what had been harmonised in the EU a few years prior; Germany had had notoriously long copyright lengths, lasting 80 years past the death of the author at one point. Don't get me wrong, copyright length is certainly too long, but blaming Disney is rather Americentric, considering the US was rather late to the game on long copyright durations.
- joshspankit 4y ago
  What do you say about the timing of the extensions?
  - mannerheim 4y ago
    For the CTEA (which is the one called the Mickey Mouse Act), that was only a few years after the EU copyright harmonisation in '93. Disney lobbied heavily for that, of course, and it was in their interest to do so, but it's likely it would have passed anyway if the EU had tied favourable trade deal conditions to harmonising copyright duration; the Senate report for the act specifically cites trade with the EU as a motivation. The Copyright Act of 1976 increased the duration specifically in order to comply with the Berne Convention the US would end up joining. There's not a particular reason for why '76, other than legislators finally decided the US would join what was considered the international standard. Both of these were more or less coincidences, in my opinion.

jedberg 4y ago

They stopped doing that a while ago. They realized it didn't matter and was more beneficial for them so they can scoop up more public domain and make more movies out of it.

phist_mcgee 4y ago
Kids don't care about Mickey they care about Rocket Raccoon.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  Yeah, I realised my children, barely a decade old, don't really know the cartoon characters I took for evergreen as a child: Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, Yogi Bear, Woody Woodpecker and Rocky & Bullwinkle. I mean they could probably name all of them, but don't really have an attachment or think they belong to a pantheon of any sorts. I assume that companies foresaw this coming and decided not to invest in further developing or promoting characters that they couldn't have exclusive merchandising rights for the foreseeable future. Just making money off a new movie isn't enough if you can't have sole rights to license the t-shirts and have the current children introduce it to their children.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    They aren't stuck with 6 TV channels to choose from and they don't have the privilege of Saturday morning cartoons to introduce all of them. They have curated experiences on streaming apps.
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    I tested with my 5 years old daughter: * She knows Mikey and Minie, I was sure about that, but I asked her anyway what kind of animal they are. [Hi from Argentina. In Spanish(es-ar) it's not obvious that "Mikey Mouse" is a "ratón".] She likes them. * Surprisingly, she knows Tom and Jerry, but she thinks it's a cat and two mice (??). I guess my brother show her a few cartoons (??), and in some of them Jerry has a friend (??). * All the other are dead. They have been good characters.
    - flobosg 4y ago
      > but she thinks it's a cat and two mice (??) > and in some of them Jerry has a friend (??) That’s probably Nibbles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_(Tom_and_Jerry) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_(Tom_and_Jerry)
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    And yet; if those characters were public domain they might be alive and well in the imagination of children today.
jonny_eh 4y ago
It's incredible the amount of damage they've done in the meantime. If only they can rollback the changes they, and their lackeys, pushed through.
- weregiraffe 4y ago
  >It's incredible the amount of damage they've done in the meantime How can you quantify this damage?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
MaxBarraclough 4y ago
> They realized it didn't matter and was more beneficial for them so they can scoop up more public domain and make more movies out of it. I don't have anything concrete to back this up, but it seems more likely to me that they just don't see much potential revenue in content from the 1920's, so they see little to be gained from further spending on copyright-extension lobbying. Put another way, they've already succeeded. Copyright terms aren't actually unending, but in profit terms (or practical terms more broadly) the difference is minimal.
- zerocrates 4y ago
  Doesn't really make sense, as these same 20s works were the ones that were kept out of the public domain the first time around with the Copyright Term Extension Act.
  - MaxBarraclough 4y ago
    Good point. Follow-on question then: why did they push for it last time? Was 1920's content more valuable at that time?

Gigachad 4y ago

Tbh it would have been better if we just allowed corporations to continue paying to extend their own copyrights forever and everything that's no longer commercially viable or doesn't have an entity owning it just gets freed quickly.

cmeacham98 4y ago
Can you explain how this is better? Also, how would we write a law to determine if something is "commercially viable"?
- MarioMan 4y ago
  If the copyright makes more money than it costs to maintain, then it is financially viable. I often see this approach proposed alongside a renewal fee that rises each time it is renewed, so that works will eventually become too expensive to maintain copyright on and thus aren't held in perpetuity.
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    What stops people from buying 1000 copyrights, then using the profitable ones to pay the ongoing fees while also buying more?
- LordDragonfang 4y ago
  The law isn't making that determination, the entities paying to indefinitely extend its copyright are (presumably at exponentially increasing rates). If it isn't viable, they don't pay and the copyright lapses.
- richardwhiuk 4y ago
  As in as a company you have to pay to extend copyright on a certain work.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  The idea is specifically to solve the orphan works problem. Practically speaking, life+70 is not that far off from perpetual copyright anyway. Nobody cares if a book published today will be escheated to the public domain in 2093, and very few works from 1927 are valuable enough to retain copyright today. In fact, it's so valueless that the vast majority of works still under copyright do not have public documentation of title. The only way to find out who owns these works is to get sued for pirating them. So the idea is to create some kind of small formality that people have to jump through in order to retain ownership over a work, because vastly more works will hit the public domain even if it means Mickey Mouse will always and forever live in a cramped pet store cage shaped like a circle-C. How to define "commercially viable" is... complicated. You can either make copyright fully pay-to-play to soak Disney, or you can err on the side of cheap renewals. I've also heard talk of sliding-scales based on taxable value of the property under copyright. I don't think it really matters as long as we have a reasonable process to strip orphan works of their copyright protection.

yieldcrv 4y ago

They have said they wont because people notice and care now. Thats an interest way of interacting in society. I want that power.

jcranmer 4y ago

Steamboat Willie doesn't go public domain until 2024, so there's technically another year. Disney is unlikely to attempt to push through another copyright term extension (see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-its-not-planning-another-copyright-extension-push/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-i... for fuller details). The two main reasons are that there is a much more forceful caucus in politics against copyright extension than there was 25 years ago, and the arguments for doing so are weaker (the copyright extension 25 years ago was partially driven by raising copyright term in the US from "life + 50" to "life + 70", in line with European standards). If one pays careful attention however, one would note that Disney has, over the past few years, started using a clip from Steamboat Willie more aggressively in its films, which has led many to wonder if they're planning on taking down anyone who distributes Steamboat Willie on the basis of trademark violations instead.

kneebonian 4y ago
I've noticed them putting steam boat willie in all of the credits, at the same time things were going into the public domain, I had always assumed that was the game plan. Make steamboat willie trademark not copyright, and the laws become a lot more flexible around that.
class4behavior 4y ago
In this case "European standards" are the product of US corporations - among others - laying foundation for the support of reforms at home.
- mannerheim 4y ago
  Life + 50 was in much of Europe in 1886 with the Berne Convention. Germany had a copyright duration of 80 years after the death of the author at one point; blaming US corporations for this is absurd when Europe has had plenty of domestic publishers with entrenched interests in longer copyright durations.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  European copyright laws have often been much stricter than in the US, in part because publishers have long been very close to the state (in countries like France and Germanu for example). If anything, Europe has been the bad influence historically, and has pionniered copyright treaties as the sibling comment mentions. It's crazy what some Europeans can blame the US for though.

Sunspark 4y ago

No extension in the next couple days, but there will be another 20+ year extension purchased within the next 11 years. Why? To make sure 1938 doesn't go PD. I will leave it up to the reader as an exercise to determine what is special about 1938.

daemoens 4y ago
What's special about 1938?
- leviathant 4y ago
  I'm going to guess the reference here is Superman
  - Sunspark 4y ago
    That's right! DC Comics is owned by Warner Brothers. In 1939 you have Namor the Sub-Mariner which is owned by Disney.
    - joshspankit 4y ago
      I wonder what Siegel and Shuster would say
andirk 4y ago
When Itchy & Scratchy teamed up for the war effort [0]? Documents on Prescott Bush, grandfather of Bush Jr, who happily sold steel to the Nazis and created the current Bush family pile [1]? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vhL6QsPGac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vhL6QsPGac [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworl...
ebiester 4y ago
Is the start of the golden age of comic books enough? I'm honestly not convinced.

standardUser 4y ago

I'm doubting a Republican Congress will go out of its way to support Disney. The fake "culture wars" may yield some unintended benefits.

GloriousKoji 4y ago

Disney is over lobbying for copyright and instead went for the legal gymnastics gold of extending Trademark protections (which never expire) to things that should fall under copyright law.

mannerheim 4y ago

Disney gets blamed a lot for this, but I don't really buy it. The copyright extension in '76 brought America into the same copyright duration as stipulated by the Berne Convention of 1886 (although the US would not sign on until a decade later), and the Sonny Bono act extended copyright length to the same as what had been harmonised in the EU a few years prior; Germany had had notoriously long copyright lengths, lasting 80 years past the death of the author at one point. Don't get me wrong, copyright length is certainly too long, but blaming Disney is rather Americentric, considering the US was rather late to the game on long copyright durations.

joshspankit 4y ago
What do you say about the timing of the extensions?
- mannerheim 4y ago
  For the CTEA (which is the one called the Mickey Mouse Act), that was only a few years after the EU copyright harmonisation in '93. Disney lobbied heavily for that, of course, and it was in their interest to do so, but it's likely it would have passed anyway if the EU had tied favourable trade deal conditions to harmonising copyright duration; the Senate report for the act specifically cites trade with the EU as a motivation. The Copyright Act of 1976 increased the duration specifically in order to comply with the Berne Convention the US would end up joining. There's not a particular reason for why '76, other than legislators finally decided the US would join what was considered the international standard. Both of these were more or less coincidences, in my opinion.